On Grading and Congressional Medals of Honor

This semester I'm TAing for an undergraduate course in introductory linguistic anthropology. It's a great course; I love thinking about language and all the multitude of ways that it shapes and is shaped by our human experiences. Teaching undergrads about topics such as linguistic relativity, speech act theory, and ethnography of communication is challenging, but it helps me to get in touch with the wonder and excitement that I felt when I was learning about these things for the first time.

I spent quite a few hours today grading the second batch of exams for the course. I normally hate grading because of the tedium, but there are always those glimmers of light that redeem it from being a total waste of time. Often, those come in the form of hilarious student errors. But today I found something even better.

One of my students who failed the first exam is a kid named Bronson. Honestly, I didn't have very high expectations that he would be able to succeed in the course; he has a learning disability that hinders his reading comprehension, and he has missed about half of the class discussions due to travel (he's an athlete). Before the first exam, he met with me once during office hours, and I could tell that he was much less well prepared than he thought he was. He bombed it.

Since that exam, he's been working his ass off in my class. He's been coming to see me almost every week during office hours, he's been meeting with a tutor, and in every discussion section I can see that there are notes scribbled all over his readings. I've rarely see a student work so hard to recover after a failed exam.

I was nervous when I got to Bronson's exam in the pile I was working through today. What students often don't understand is that, when I'm grading, I'm on their side.  I want them to do well, and I'm sad when they don't. I hate to give a bad grade to a student whose work is not up to standards when I know that he or she has truly tried their hardest. As I picked up Bronson's exam and started grading it, I was whispering to myself "Please pass! Please pass! Please pass!"

Normally I prefer for my students to get straight to the point of their answers, without a lot of extraneous meta-discourse: it gives me less to grade and gives them fewer chances to trip themselves up. But I must admit that I was positively charmed by the way that Bronson put his entire thought process on paper in his answers to these questions. In a question that asked "Is this an example of A or of B?", he drew a tree diagram (painstakingly and perfectly memorized from the readings) that showed possibilities A through G and correctly identified the answer to the problem as B. In another question that took a similar form, he wrote through the process of elimination: "I was going to say that this is X, but then I realized that... so I thought against that. It's not true that.... , so Y is out. Therefore, I think that it must be Z because...." It was roundabout, yes, and a bit cumbersome to read, but he got the right answer for that question as well.

I am proud to report that not only did he pass, he got a solid B+! I'm so excited to give the exam back to him on Monday and tell him that I admire his hard work and am thrilled to see how it's paid off. I'm reminded of one of my favorite lines from Taylor Mali: "I can make a C+ feel like a Congressional medal of honor." Time to pin one on Bronson. God, I love teaching.